By Milton Caniff

One day recently I drove past a house in which I had lived when I was ten--the site of my personal Ancient city where, years ago, I had built a metropolis along a dry gulch which edged the isolated dwelling in Redlands, California. My buildings were packing boxes of all sizes; the street vehicles and railway equipment were made from smaller cardboard containers, such as butter boxes. The nearby arroyos and canyons were choice hunting country, which my friends and I combed for used shotgun shells. The heavy caliber casings became men and the smaller gauges served as girls and women. The brass ends enabled the shells to stand upright.

Every activity in my city wa fully manned and ready for whatever the plot line of the Saturday and Sunday story called for. My hero was a bold venturer named Tom Martin (a nonethnic label--editorial caution came early!). There I would act out the villians and the good guys and plot devices against the sinister elements.

Drawing Steve Canyon stirs up recollections of the city I built long ago. The full-time catalyst of my resident company is Steve Canyon himself. In time, he taken unto himself a wife (following a goodly string of chicks in many parts of the world) and altered his life-style to conform to the accepted standards of home-delivered newspapers. When I move the focus to Poteet Canyon (Steve's onetime ward and kissin' cousin), another level of everyday life opens to the reader's eye. She is a newspaper reporter, a Libber, and a member of the singles' world so often in the news of the day. Leighton Olson (son of Steve's wife, Summer, by an earlier marriage) leads me in that turbulent area of the college set whose members work so hard at being identified by conformity.

After myriad devices to hold circulation in the competitive newspapers of the past, the hang-'em-on-the-cliff story cartoons are the only remains of the technique which sought to force the reader to come back the next day to learn what happened to the characters he has come to love or hate.

In a real sense we involve the reader as much as an audience participation show in the theater or on television. Our reader loyalty is less overt, but has a longer life expectancy. People never forget the first cartoon which broke through their consciousness.

My task is to combine the pleasures of yesterday with expectations of tomorrow and serve it up as the ten-cent black-and-white special available today. On Sunday, of course, there is color--for a slightly higher price.

- Milton Caniff, The Comics: An Illustrated History Of Comic Strip Art, 1974